Musing on yoga, wellness and living a healthy, happy life

May 03, 2014

Should You Walk Out On A Yoga Teacher?

Marc Silver recently wrote an artickee for NPR entitled, when a yoga teacher ticks you off, is it rude to walk out? What I fould interesting is that the students opinions and the opinions of the yoga insturctors was night and day. Instructors think you shoud stick it out while students say that you should walk out. Everyone's points are valid. I don't know what the right answer is. I see both sides.

I used to feel that you shouldn' t walk out because as emotions come up, it is good to face them. A good teacher purposely makes a student come face to face with their emotions so that they can learn to be present with them and maybe even overcome them.

However, the yoga market has changed. There was a time when the average teacher spent years learning underneath their own teacher and spent even longer developing their own practice. Every part of the class was purposeful. If emotions came up, the teacher was doing it on purpose and knew how to deal with that student and the situation. The teacher followed parampara or a lineage and their was a clear path that the teacher was taking the student down and the student knew this. The method was developed over hundreds of years and you respected it.

In the current market, many classes are primarily physical and the only path is to develop a nice body,a cool handstand and get a yoga high at the end. Teachers practice for maybe a couple of years jumping from teacher to teacher and studio to studio, then enter a teacher training where they are taught yoga philosophy more as history then as something to be incorporated into classes. When it comes to learning how to teach a class, it is all about a strong physical sequence.

Modern day students are fully aware that their teachers are not sages but just really cool people who love yoga. They understand that their teacher really isn't taking them down a path and for $2500 and a few weeks of their time, they can be in their shoes in a couple of months. Its a business relationship. If they go to a restaurant and get bad service, they will complain, not pay, walk out, get angry etc. The same is true for their yoga class.

Nowadays, I will walk out of a yoga class if a person is just straight up incompetent or putting me in danger. If I understand that the teacher has a purpose for what they are doing and I just don't like it, I will stay.